There have been a lot of buzz about the latest VMware bug. As always, there is nearly a competition about who screams loadest about “the big catastrophy”.

The bug, which was a time bomb left in the code after the bug testing period, make it impossible to power on new virtual machines after August 12th. Pretty stupid bug which should have been caught in Q&A, but it didn’t.

So, here are my thoughts:

• The bug did not make your virtualization solution more vulnerable for attacks from the outside. So, no security issues
• The bug did not make your servers go down unless you use VMotion, HA or DRS. So, you should probably be able to reduce the impact of the bug by turning those features off.
• VMware fixed the problem within 36 hours, as they said they would. They have also made alternative patches for those of you who can’t turn off or migrate off virtual hosts while patching.
• The bug appeared in a new release. A good sysadmin knows that all new software have bugs and delays the production phase in untill the first wave of patches have been released.

So, yeah, the bug was annoying. Yeah, it forced you to patch and reboot your ESX(i) hosts. Well, what’st he huge problem? My guess is that very few of the companies with ESX(i) hosts in production were affected by this bug. So, I just waited for the patch and used the opportunity to change from ESX to ESXi on my Poweredge 2850 :-)